


Doubles; or, Six People Jim Isn't

by my_daroga



Category: Star Trek, Star Trek RPF, Star Trek: Alternate Original Series (Movies), Star Trek: The Original Series
Genre: Doubles, Gen, Metafiction, Narcissism, RPF, implied self-cest
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-10-11
Updated: 2013-10-11
Packaged: 2017-12-29 01:48:32
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,586
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/999431
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/my_daroga/pseuds/my_daroga
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Six people Jim isn't. My exploration of doubles, in canon and out. Warning for hints of selfcest and RPF, though it could be seen as abstract meta. It really only makes sense in the context of the game I was in, but I like a lot of what it says.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Doubles; or, Six People Jim Isn't

**The Brother**  
  
Jim had figured out, at a very early age, that George Jr. didn't want to be compared to their father. So he called him Sam, and congratulated himself on being sensitive, and never even knew that as they grew older (and the age difference between them became more negligible) that the one Sam really did not want to be compared to was Jim.  
  
Jim was aware that they looked alike, because people had mentioned it more and more as he'd filled out. His twin, three years older. But Sam was careful to show support for Jim's accomplishments, to vocally approve of his following in (and outdistancing) George's footsteps, and never to demonstrate, by word or deed, the strain of being the older brother of James T. Kirk. Starfleet's, and his parents', golden boy. Jim thought the mustache did not suit him, but his casual ribbing had only elicited gentle silence on the subject. He approved of Aurelan, wished he could dote on his nephews, and mourned Sam's death with a depth that yet did not understand what it had meant for Sam, the first born, to nevertheless come after his little brother.  
  
 **The Android**  
  
It was a flawless replica, or so Jim would have seen if he'd been as truly enamored of himself as was sometimes supposed by those who did not know him well. He was struck, for some time, by the questions its every move, every word, posed. Do I look like that? Do I sound like that? Do I really tilt my head, my eyes really catch the light, in just that way?  
  
The questions were not born of narcissism but genuine curiosity at an opportunity few were granted. To see themselves from the outside. Superficially, anyway. But those questions soon gave way to more fundamental ones, as Christine Chapel was unable to tell them apart, as he learned the truth about Andrea and then Korby.  
  
If he had not known, from the beginning--if he himself was not most assuredly James T. Kirk—would he have _known_? How long would Spock have taken, without that implanted response? The robot did not have the things that made Kirk Kirk. It lacked his compassion, his emotion, though it displayed the superficial signifiers of them pretty convincingly. And oddly, in the end it was undone by its refusal to respond to something Andrea shouldn’t have, either. Something Jim had aroused in her, which she had been unable to arouse in it.  
  
He was almost glad it hadn’t had a chance to convince him it was anything but a machine.  
  
 **The Divided Self**  
  
He’s still not sure why even now, reunited, he still thinks of the meeker half as the “real” Kirk, the “good” Kirk. He shouldn’t, he knows that. The point had been made, and the darker half is strong enough that he recognizes that they are both equally him. That the “real” Jim was not Jim at all, merely the half capable of gaining his crew’s and his friends’ support.  
  
But not forever. He could not have held it, and that bothers him, too. He had their sympathy, their backing, but he did not have command. That which made him a good man did not make him a good commander—though without the good man, the commander was useless. The thought consoles him less than it should, he thinks. So why is it he persists in thinking of one as him, the other a Hyde of sorts, like the old misperception that Jekyll was the good version?  
  
Jekyll was the average.  
  
It’s because, he thinks, one half was able to understand that the other belonged to him, too. And the other wasn’t. One half could admit weakness, in himself and the other, and the other couldn’t. One half recognized that both were necessary, at least to a point. Had that been weakness, or common sense? Even knowing the latter was true, he cannot dismiss the former. Jim doesn’t think love is a weakness. But love was what the weak half had felt for the strong. Was there causation, or mere correlation? And why, Jim wonders, does he automatically assume that the weakness was concentrated in one, and assume strength was to be found in brutality and rape?  
  
What does that say about him now, no longer divided? What is he capable of? Do weakness and love counterbalance strength and brutality?  
  
And what does it mean, that one half of him could love the other half without condoning his behavior? Without any chance of being loved, respected, or wanted in return?  
  
Sometimes he thinks it had been easier like that. It hadn’t really, of course, but at least then he’d known. Maybe that was why he persisted in thinking of one as good, the other… not. Because at least then his motives were obvious, his desires and decisions clearly delineated by which self they originated in. The horrible thing was that seeing that worse half had raised doubts he hadn’t had in years, making that demarcation all the more attractive in the first place. Integration was unavoidable, and mostly he didn’t think about it anymore. But when he did, it was with a feeling of vague discomfort, the truth that he was an admirable human being and captain _despite_ those weaknesses lost in the truth that there were things lurking inside him which no man needed to know about himself.  
  
 **The Mirror**  
  
He never met the captain of the _I.S.S. Enterprise_. He only ever saw him reflected in Marlena’s eyes, in her tone of voice, in her goodbye as she spoke it to another man in another universe. Marlena was not irredeemable. Nor was that world’s Spock, he thought. Both ruthless, self-serving, and intelligent. Survivors.  
  
His counterpart had not lasted a minute. Both the robot and his own brutal half had fared better. What about that environment had created that man? One less recognizable as himself than a soulless android? Less like him than the Spock resembled the man he knew? He sought certainty, some clue that he could pin the difference on something external. It did not occur to him to assume that there were worlds in which his nature allowed him to excel, in which he had the advantage. That his own might, in fact, be one of them. It might not have been that comforting, after all.  
  
 **The Younger Model**  
  
He’d known him immediately, though later as the differences piled up he wondered why it had seemed so obvious. And yet, learning all the ways in which Jim was different from him had not lessened his sense that they were the same person. Not the same individual.   
  
Maybe it had helped. Maybe those differences allowed Jim to step back at the same time that he clasped Jim to him like a more-than-brother, once-and-future-lover. They’d stepped into it without thinking, operating on instinct, bodies in tune in a way neither had ever experienced that was somehow so purely physical it transcended mere lust. Though it was as natural as masturbation, it wasn’t that, either, because it did not exist in a vacuum. It was connection, in purest unspoken form. It was everything he had always wanted to be for a lover, for himself, reflected back. Without the need for explanation or excuse, because unlike the others, this Jim embraced him back.  
  
 **The Actor**  
  
He didn’t know what it meant, that Bill Shatner looked exactly like him. The metaphysical reality of it was beyond anyone’s grasp, for the time being, but there he was, brilliant and beautiful and somehow a more perfect mirror (in reverse, of course) than any of the others, despite there being no question that he wasn’t Jim Kirk at all.  
  
Or was he?  
  
After all, if there was anyone who could be said to share his experiences, even in diluted, play-acting form, it was Bill. If there was anyone whose expressions accurately reflected his own, whose body seemed struck from the same mold, it was Bill. So why, then, did Jim embrace him so fully, when the others, the replicas and splits and alternate selves, were rejected? Why did Bill look at him that way, when the others had instead insisted on their own supremacy?  
  
Maybe it was the assurance that Bill wasn't Jim. Distance, like with the younger Jim but this time of the self rather than the body. So Jim could, for the first time, take in what others saw when they looked at him. And enjoy it. He knew they all laughed—Len and Bones and Spock (if he could)--but he and Bill were laughing too and anyway everyone seemed to find it equally alluring, so who, really, was letting lust run away with them? What sensualist, after all, could reject the opportunity to explore a body identical to one's own, whose responses one could tease out, whose technique one could study as if one were one's own partner?   
  
All those selves, all the duplicates (save the younger Jim, of course), were parts Bill had played. And maybe Jim sought them in him, too. What he had rejected and what had challenged him. What he had fought to assert that, indeed, he was James T. Kirk. Bill reflected him, too. And if Jim's enchantment with him was narcissism, at least, he thought, it was narcissism taken to an absurd extreme. No one could accuse him of doing anything by halves.  
  
And no one, he thought not so privately, could really blame him.


End file.
